Floater ... and other short stories

Prison planets never had much going for them and when the prisoners themselves start running it you can expect it to go to Hell in a basket. That’s why the Angel in ‘Floater’ is so good at his job, because he has to be. But he never expected that he would be so good as to be thought capable of sorting it all out. High powers did, however, much to his consternation.

Children the world over are much the same and ‘Now Children’ shows how kids in the classroom haven’t changed over millennia, and no matter how advanced a civilisation, scratch a kid and there’s a heathen just under the surface with an unhealthy leavening of racism thrown in.

In ‘Smile Please’ you’re in line for a soul exchange unless you’re very careful in this madcap exercise in bottling souls for posterity. Does it go wrong? Of course. It wouldn’t be Eugene Budd if it didn’t.

You might expect ‘A Stitch in Time’ to be something of a saviour, but then, you probably haven’t factored in an officious robot programmed as only a bureaucratic nerd can where things don’t belong unless they tick boxes.

An anthology of four short stories.